Ideas Delivered in Salesforce Winter 16
The Salesforce Community continues to provide a multitude of awesome suggestions to the Salesforce Product Teams via the IdeaExchange; in fact, it was announced in August that with this Winter ‘16 release, over 1 million idea points will have been delivered since Dreamforce ‘14. Give yourselves a pat on the back and celebrate, this latest release will go down as a pivotal point in the transformation of Salesforce and it was driven by your suggestions.
Winter ‘16 features include 30 IdeaExchange submissions across every aspect of the tool, and this post will identify some of the key enhancements.
Force.com Customization
- Universal Picklists Pilot/Beta (43,790 points) - Called “Global Picklists” and available in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic, this feature allows you to reuse a single list of values for multiple custom picklist fields - similar to “Industry” or “Lead Source” fields. You can share picklists across objects and effectively keep your picklist data clean by preventing users from adding erroneous or redundant values through the API. This capability is currently Pilot/Beta but can more than likely be used in a large majority of implementations, I’d go as far as calling this a game changer!
- Create More Roll-Up Summary Fields per Object (6,130 points) - Bumped up from a limit of 10 to 25 per object, go on and add some from your wish list.
- Limit Imported Records to Existing Picklist Values Pilot/Beta (1,700 points) - You most certainly could use the help with maintaining data integrity and standardization.
General Enhancements
- Allow Salesforce Administrators to update records owned by Inactive/Terminated Users (5,780 points) - Hear that joyous singing? It’s the Awesome Admins who have been pulling their hair out playing the “let’s shuffle active / inactive user license” game when trying to Mass Update records.
Service
- Enter New Contacts on the Fly When Opening a New Case (9,040 points) - No longer will you have to stop entering the Case, create a new Contact, and then return to creating the new Case. What will you do with your free time?
- Increase Number of Characters in Subject Field: Case Emails (3,540 points) - For the Email-to-Case implementations, you now have the luxury of 650 characters in email subject lines. Can you believe the previous limit was 100 characters? That’s less than Twitter.
- Report on Knowledge Users (2,840 points) No more will you need to maintain a (gasp) spreadsheet of your Knowledge users.
Sales
- Ability to create custom lookup fields on the activity object (21,400 points) - A long awaited feature and a step in the right direction. This idea was merged with 23 others leaving no doubt there is more work to be done.
Development: API
- Make Audit Setup Trail History available via the API (2,740 points) - Remember when you used to “screen scrape” the page and paste the values? Those were fun times.
Reports and Dashboards
- Allow more than 3 columns in dashboards (83,340 points) - Here at last, and yes, it is only available in Lightning Experience, but who isn’t licking their chops for future dashboards that fill those sexy new widescreen monitors?
Search
- Global Search without Enabling Chatter (6,150 points) and Turning off Global Search in Winter Release should NOT turn off Chatter (2,940 points ) - Global Search and Chatter have been surgically separated so you now can enable one or the other, or both. This allows companies the flexibility they need to satisfy their end users and conform to internal policy.
Every Salesforce release is enhanced through great suggestions such as these. Do you have some favorites that we didn’t mention? Please feel free to comment below, on the Salesforce Success Community, on our Facebook page, or directly at me on Twitter @sfdcclicks.
